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Plato   /plˈeɪtoʊ/   Listen
Plato

noun
1.
Ancient Athenian philosopher; pupil of Socrates; teacher of Aristotle (428-347 BC).



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"Plato" Quotes from Famous Books



... who strove to be great and grand in morals and in intellect, and perhaps strove all the more earnestly for this on account of the decline they saw about them. Few countries in any age have had more splendid men than Socrates, Plato, Euripides, Aristophanes, Pelopidas, Epaminondas, Demosthenes, Dion, and Timoleon, and these all lived between the Peloponnesian and the Macedonian wars. And while the arts were less grand than before, they did not fall into decline for some years, though they took on new features. ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement

... course mainly theological, he always kept fresh his interest in the classical studies of his youth. He did not depend on his communings with Origen and Eusebius for keeping up his Greek, but went back as often as he could find time to Plato and to the Tragedians. Macaulay has defined a Greek scholar as one who can read Plato with his feet on the fender. Dr. Cairns could fully satisfy this condition; indeed he went beyond it, for when he went from home he was in the habit of taking a volume of Plato ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns

... sorts of discouragement—into a full bloom which we afterward see could not have reached its maturity at any other time, and would surely have missed its most peculiar and cherished qualities if reared in any other place. The Ionian intellect of Athens culminates in Plato; Florence runs into the mould of Dante's verse, like fluid bronze; Paris secures remembrance of her wide curiosity in Voltaire's settled expression; and Samuel Johnson holds fast for us that London of the eighteenth century ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop

... eloquent man I ever listened to. I don't mean that he's the greatest man, or the profoundest statesman, or the wisest politician, or the sagest political economist; but I do mean that, for natural powers of persuasion and denunciation—for natural oratory—I have never known his rival. If Plato's maxim, 'that oratory must be estimated by its effects,' is at all correct, then is M. Dantes the greatest orator in France, for the effect of his oratory is miraculous. There is a sort of magic in his clear, sonorous, powerful, yet most exquisitely modulated ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg

... Apocalypse. Human philosophy has ninety-nine parts of error to the one-hundredth part of Truth,—an unsafe decoction for the race. The Science that Jesus demonstrated, whose views of Truth Confucius and Plato but dimly discerned, Science and Health interprets. It was not a search after wisdom; it was wisdom, and it grasped in spiritual law the universe,—all time, space, immortality, thought, extension. This Science demonstrated the Principle of all phenomena, identity, ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy

... to the temple of Delphi of his own statue in solid gold. We must not, I presume, suppose that it was as large as the life. His way of living, as well as that of Hippias and Protagoras, two other eminent teachers of those times, is represented by Plato as splendid, even to ostentation. Plato himself is said to have lived with a good deal of magnificence. Aristotle, after having been tutor to Alexander, and most munificently rewarded, as it is universally agreed, ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith

... good of society, and that this alone should be the compass to guide those who are in command, whatever be the form of government." It is likewise the view of Mill, in Representative Government, that the well-being of the governed is the sole object of government. It was the view of Plato before the Christian era: his ideal city should be established, "that the whole City might be in the happiest condition." (The Republic, Book 4.) Calderwood writes: "Political Government can be legitimately constructed ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney

... Adam might have been an hieroglyphic design of the Egyptian philosophers, showing their opinion that Mankind was originally of both sexes united, and was afterwards divided into males and females: an opinion in later times held by Plato, and I believe by Aristotle, and which must have arisen from profound inquiries into the ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin

... favor of the duke and duchess; but, though it afflicts me much, it affects not my determination, for I must comply with the duties of my profession in preference to any other claim; as it is often said, Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas. I write this in Latin, being persuaded that thou hast learned that language since thy promotion. Farewell, and God have thee in His keeping; so mayst thou escape the ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... was essential that all classes of public officials should have the opportunity of learning whatever can be known of economics and politics taught on modern lines. Our old Universities provided lectures on political science as it was understood by Plato and Aristotle, by Hobbes and Bentham: they did not then—and indeed they do not now—teach how New Zealand deals with strikes, how America legislates about trusts, how municipalities all over the ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease

... victorious. After this, supping cheerfully among his friends, he retired to his apartment, where he behaved with unusual tenderness to his son, and to all his friends. When he came into his bed-chamber, laying himself down, he took up Plato's Dialogue on the Immortality of the Soul, and read for some time. Casting his eyes to the head of his bed, he wondered much not to see his sword there, which had been conveyed away by his son's order while they were at supper. Calling to one of his domestics to know ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith

... rigid class lines preventing adequate interplay of experiences—the more action tends to become routine on the part of the class at a disadvantage, and capricious, aimless, and explosive on the part of the class having the materially fortunate position. Plato defined a slave as one who accepts from another the purposes which control his conduct. This condition obtains even where there is no slavery in the legal sense. It is found wherever men are engaged in activity which is socially serviceable, but whose service they do not understand and ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey

... after him to devise a complete code of conduct was Solon, who lived seven hundred years after. A little later came Zoroaster, then Confucius, Buddha, Lao-tsze, Pericles, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle—contemporaries, or closely following each other, their philosophy woven and interwoven by all and ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard

... whence came The Bull, the Lion, and the Ram? Did not we here the Argo rig, Make BERENICE's periwig? Whose liv'ry does the Coachman wear? 845 Or who made Cassiopeia's chair? And therefore, as they came from hence, With us may hold intelligence. PLATO deny'd the world can be Govern'd without geometree, 850 (For money b'ing the common scale Of things by measure, weight, and tale, In all th' affairs of Church and State, 'Tis both the balance and ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler

... the lecturer goes on, in his second and third lectures, to trace the history of Moral Philosophy, from Pythagoras to Mrs. Trimmer. Plato is praised for beauty of style, and blamed for mistiness of doctrine. Aristotle is contrasted, greatly to his disadvantage, with Bacon. "Volumes of Aristotelian philosophy have been written which, if piled one upon another, would have equalled the Tower of Babel in Height, ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell

... unfitt to be introduced. A deepe blush on sweet Mercy's face ledd to y'e detection of y'e paraphrast, and drew on her some deserved commendations. Erasmus, turning to my father, exclaymed with animation, "I woulde call this house the academy of Plato, were it not injustice to compare it to a place where the usuall disputations concerning figures and numbers were onlie oocasionallie intersperst with disquisitions concerning y'e moral virtues." Then, in a graver mood, he added, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various

... only the first of a new series"; a discoverer, whose heart knows, with Voltaire, "that man seriously reflects when left alone," and would then discover, if he can, that "wondrous chain which links the heavens with earth—the world of beings subject to one law." In his reflections Emerson, unlike Plato, is not afraid to ride Arion's Dolphin, and to go wherever he is carried—to Parnassus or ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives

... casque full upon a dying man. A courtier, who saw Othello performed at the Globe Theatre, remarked, that the blackamoor was a brute, and not a man. 'Thou hast reason,' replied a great Lord, 'according to Plato his saying; for this be a two-legged animal with feathers.' The fatal habit became universal. The language was corrupted. The infection spread to the national conscience. Political double-dealings naturally grew ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... bishops, cardinals and popes, including the portrait of Pope Urban VI. Under the saint's feet are Sabellius, Arius, Averroes, and other heretics and philosophers with their books all torn. On either side of St Thomas are Plato, showing the Timaeus, and Aristotle pointing to his Ethics. Above is Jesus Christ, also in the air, with the four Evangelists about him. He is blessing St Thomas, and apparently sending the Holy Spirit upon him, filling ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari

... concentrated their attention upon ethical problems. Forsaking the study of the macrocosm for that of the microcosm, they lost the key to the thought of the great Ephesian, which, I imagine, is more intelligible to us than it was to Socrates, or to Plato. Socrates, more especially, set the fashion of a kind of inverse agnosticism, by teaching that the problems of physics lie beyond the reach of the human intellect; that the attempt to solve them is essentially ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... business. I wonder what he thinks about when he looks at me seriously. I cannot doubt his wisdom. He seems to resemble a philosopher who has traveled to us from a distant world. If he cast me a sentence from Plato, I would say, "Master, I listen." Is it Greek he speaks, or a dark language from a corner of the sky? He has a far-off look as though he saw quite through these superficial affairs of earth. His eyes have borrowed ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks

... verse. Though but a few fragments of his composition have come down to us, he may, perhaps, be regarded as the father of fable, considered as a distinct art. Induced by his example, many Greek poets and philosophers tried their hands in it. Archilocus, Alcaeus, Aristotle, Plato, Diodorus, Plutarch, and Lucian, have left us specimens. Collections of fables bearing the name of Aesop became current in the Greek language. It was not, however, till the year 1447 that the large collection ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine

... truths are discovered by the light of nature originated from St. John's interpretation of a passage in the Gospel of Plato. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... acute and judicious of the interpreters of Aristotle." Chosroes gave the band of philosophers a hospitable reception, entertained them at his table, and was unwilling that they should leave his court. They found him acquainted with the writings of Aristotle and Plato, whose works he had caused to be translated into the Persian tongue. If he was not able to enter very deeply into the dialectical and metaphysical subtleties which characterize alike the Platonic Dialogues and the Aristotelian treatises, at any rate he was ready to discuss with them such questions ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson

... The Kasidah! Burton calls it a translation of a poem by a certain Haji Abdu. There may have been a Haji Abdu who supplied thoughts, and even verses, but the production is really a collection of ideas gathered from all quarters. Confucius, Longfellow, Plato, the FitzGeraldian Oman Khayyam, Aristotle, Pope, Das Kabir and the Pulambal are drawn upon; the world is placed under tribute from Pekin to the Salt Lake City. A more careless "borrower" to use Emerson's expression, never lifted poetry. Some of his lines are transferred ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright

... liable to the revolutions of chance and fashion than these pretended decisions of science. The case is not the same with the beauties of eloquence and poetry. Just expressions of passion and nature are sure, after a little time, to gain public applause, which they maintain for ever. Aristotle and Plato and Epicurus and Descartes may successively yield to each other: but Terence and Virgil maintain an universal, undisputed empire over the minds of men. The abstract philosophy of Cicero has lost its credit: the vehemence of his oratory is still the ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin

... Fra Sisto was painting the figures of angels. There, after saluting the good Brother, he drew out from a great painted chest one of the books newly come from Constantinople, laid it on a desk and began to turn over the leaves. It was a Treatise on Love, writ in Greek by the divine Plato. Messer Guido sighed; his hands began to tremble and ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France

... that woman should have her philosopher, but it must be owned that she has made an odd choice in Plato. No one would be more astonished than the severe dialectician of the Academy at the feminine conception of a sage of dreamy and poetic temperament, who spends half his time in asserting woman's rights, and half in inventing a peculiar ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous

... very good friends with one another. I with her, because I had been able to obtain what I desired; she with me, for no appreciable motive—which fact, according to Plato, elevated her into the highest rank of the ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France

... the books of the Zendavesta, and the period at which Zoroaster lived, there is the greatest difference of opinion. He is mentioned by Plato, who speaks of 'the magic (or religious doctrines) of Zoroaster the Ormazdian.' As Plato speaks of his religion as something established in the form of Magism, or the system of the Medes in West Iran, which the Avesta appears to have originated in ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR

... the average academically-trained man to offer? He has an assortment of second-hand ideas borrowed from Plato and Socrates, from Ovid and Virgil and Horace; he can echo Voltaire, Goethe, Kant, Shakespeare, Dante; he can dish up Aristotle, Pythagoras, Bacon, Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, Davy, Faraday and Darwin. He can borrow illustrations from classical mythology; ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst

... confines—is the noblest of all his faculties, even though for that very reason it is capable of being most ignobly perverted. What its bestowal tells us is that God does not call us into servitude, but to that service which is perfect freedom; He might have made us His playthings, as Plato suggested,[3] but by endowing us with the power to choose for ourselves He has made us His potential fellow-workers. May we not ask—Who, after all, would prefer the safety of automatism to the glory ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... smirking genius, of a sudden, Extinguish life's taper, well pleas'd I'll hasten To Xenophon and Plato's musing shade And to Anacreon's myrtle ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis

... night on Christ in you, the hope of glory. I can understand, 1. How Christ, in the sense of Christianity, or the doctrine of Christ, can be in us. We sometimes hear from people such expressions as: "He is full of Plato, or full of Seneca, or full of Shakespeare," when speaking of a man who has got his mind full of the sentiments of those writers. And I can understand well enough how Christianity, which brings life and immortality to light, should beget in men's minds a hope ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker

... dead must have been very common in antiquity. Both Plato[58] and Euripides[59] mention it; and the belief that the dead have a knowledge of the future, which seems to be ingrained in human nature, gave these oracles great power. Thus, Cicero tells[60] us that Appius often consulted "soul-oracles" (psychomantia), and also ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley

... can have." Human laws excite fears and apprehensions, least crimes committed may be detected and punished: But a virtuous education is calculated to reach and influence the heart, and to prevent crimes. A very judicious writer, has quoted Plato, who in shewing what care for the security of States ought to be taken of the education of youth, speaks of it as almost sufficient to supply the place both of Legislation and Administration. Such an education, which leads the youth beyond mere outside ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams

... to all; Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled: The glory, jest, and riddle of the world! Go, wondrous creature! mount where science guides, Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides; Instruct the planets in what orbs to run, Correct old time, and regulate the sun; Go, soar with Plato to th' empyreal sphere, To the first good, first perfect, and first fair; Or tread the mazy round his followers trod, And quitting sense call imitating God; As Eastern priests in giddy circles run, And turn their heads to imitate the sun. Go, teach ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope

... but, as it was impossible for them to conceive the creation of matter, the workman in the Stoic philosophy was not sufficiently distinguished from the work; whilst, on the contrary, the spiritual God of Plato and his disciples resembled an idea, rather than a substance. The opinions of the Academics and Epicureans were of a less religious cast; but whilst the modest science of the former induced them to doubt, the positive ignorance of the latter urged ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... from Telesius and Nicolas, complaining the while that the priestly garb of the latter sometimes hindered the free movement of his thought. Beside these thinkers he has a high regard for Pythagoras, Plato, Lucretius, Raymundus Lullus, and Copernicus (died 1543).[1] He forms the transition link between Nicolas of Cusa and Leibnitz, as also the link between Cardanus and Spinoza. To Spinoza Bruno offered the naturalistic conception of God (God is the "first ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg

... got it either from Egypt or from India, since he visited and studied in both those countries. If, as Sinnett asserts, the true Chinese belong to the fourth root-race, as appears not improbable, did not the system come into India from China? Plato was a Buddhist, says our author. Quintilian, perhaps getting his idea from Cicero, says of Plato that he learned his philosophy from the Egyptian priests. It is much more probable that the latter ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. I, No. 3, March, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various

... idea," said the little man as they emerged into the narrow street. "Now ideas may be divided variously into classes, as, for instance, ideas which are good, bad, or indifferent. Or you may contrast the idea of Plato with ideas anything but platonic—take it as you please. Then there is my idea, which is in itself, good, interesting, and worthy of the embalming process; and there is your idea, which I am human enough to consider ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford

... underlying the exterior world of change there is an unchangeable reality which is identical with that which underlies the essence in man [Footnote ref 1]. If we look at Greek philosophy in Parmenides or Plato or at modern philosophy in Kant, we find the same tendency towards glorifying one unspeakable entity as the reality or the essence. I have said above ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta

... had imagined a magnificent theory, when he averred that every man had within him a spark of the divine flame. But, silly PLATO! he never considered how easily this spark might be blown out. At this moment, how many Englishmen are walking about the land utterly extinguished! Had men been made on the principle of the safety-lamp, they might have ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 30, 1841 • Various

... della quedara libre y se podra Casar con otro y por El consiguiente si Ella fuere Ruyn le podra quitar la dote qe le dio y dexalla, y Casar se con otra sea me todos testigos deste concierto qe se hace y acabado de decir esto toman Vn plato de aRoz linpio Crudo y biene Vna vieja y toma las manos derechas de los desposados y ponelas encima del aRoz y junta la vna mano con la otra y en teniendo las juntas toma el arroz y de Rama lo por encima de todos los qe estan en el Vanguete y entonces ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume V., 1582-1583 • Various

... Socrates did no writing himself, and the only information we have of him we get from the writings of his pupils and from later writers, and our most reliable knowledge comes from two of these writers, Plato ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever

... John Johnstone, having carefully studied Elkington's system, under its author, in the peripatetic method, undertook, like Plato, to record the sayings of his master in science, and produced a work, entitled, "An Account of the Most Approved Mode of Draining Land, According to the System Practised by Mr. Joseph Elkington." It ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French

... there are many above him wiser than he; and to be always asking questions, wanting to learn, not to teach. No one ever teaches well who wants to teach, or governs well who wants to govern; it is an old saying (Plato's, but I know not if his, first), ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... pleasant to play with children, especially unborn children. The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already covered with illegible scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulent as humanity. And the upshot of this modern attitude is really this: that men invent new ideals because they dare ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton

... she could think of nothing more delightful. For an instant she saw herself in her drawing-room in Browne Street with a Plato open on her knees—Plato in the original Greek. She could not help believing that a real scholar, if specially interested, could slip Greek into her head ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf

... have it so. Not all the kings and emperors of the earth, If they would lay their crowne before my feet, Shall ransom him, or take him from his cage: The ages that shall talk of Tamburlaine, Even from this day to Plato's wondrous year, Shall talk how I have handled Bajazeth: These Moors, that drew him from Bithynia To fair Damascus, where we now remain, Shall lead him with us wheresoe'er we go.— Techelles, and my loving ...
— Tamburlaine the Great, Part I. • Christopher Marlowe

... cream of sapience; and one had more reason still to expect this from any superior genius. But, alas! my dear Sir, what a tumble is here! Your D'Alembert is a mere mortal oracle. Who but would have laughed, if, when the buffoon Aristophanes ridiculed Socrates, Plato had condemned the former, not for making sport with a great man in distress, but because Plato hated some blind old woman ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole

... and their differences;—of the whiteness in snow, and in almond-paste, and their differences;—of the blackness and brightness of night and day, or of smoke and gaslight, and their differences, etc., etc. But for the Perception of Beauty, I always used Plato's word, which is the proper word in Greek, and the only possible single word that can be used in any other language by any man who understands the subject,—'Theoria,'—the Germans only having a term parallel to it, 'Anschauung,' assumed to be its equivalent in p. 22 of the old edition of 'Modern ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin

... and again, generation after generation and age after age. Yet never once does it receive the slightest hint or suggestion of an answer. And, depend upon it, if the Son of Man had never come into the world, it would have echoed round the globe—still unanswered and unanswerable—until this day. 'O Plato, Plato!' cried Socrates, 'it may be that the gods can forgive sin, but, alas, I do not see how!' Nor anybody else. Job's question fell back upon his face; the universe could give him no reply. It is very striking. And so, here at the beginning of my ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham

... exposure of deformed or sickly infants was undoubtedly an ancient custom in Greece; in Sparta, at least, it was enjoined by law. It was also approved of by the most enlightened among the Greek philosophers. Plato condemns all those children who are imperfect in limbs as well as those who are born ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger

... Aristotle a real Greek city has risen, peopled with peripatetic philosophers, and guarded by sentinels armed with propositions, antitheses, and sophisms, the master himself living in the centre of the town in a magnificent palace. Thus also in Plato's circle live souls continually occupied in the study of the prototype of ideas. Two years ago a fresh division of lunar property was made, some astronomers being ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley

... happy soules have place, In full enioyment of felicitie, Whence they doe still behold the glorious face 80 Of the Divine Eternall Maiestie; More faire is that where those Idees on hie Enraunged be, which Plato so admyred, And pure Intelligences from ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser

... school We learn to farm by modern rule; Professor Walter fills the chair, But teaches in the open air. And by his side we tend the stock, Or swing the scythe, or bind the shock. Nor miss we academic lore, We walk where Plato walked before, And eloquent Demosthenes, Who taught their youth beneath the trees; Here with sharp eyes we love to scan The rules that point Dame Nature's plan, We mark the track of bear and deer, And long to see them reft ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon

... unsympathising reasoner might in the same way argue that religion is intolerant, that conscience makes cowards, that piety rejoices in fraud. Recent experience has added little to the observations of those who witnessed the decline after Pericles, of Thucydides, Aristophanes, Plato, and of the writer whose brilliant tract against the Athenian Republic is printed among the works of Xenophon. The manifest, the avowed difficulty is that democracy, no less than monarchy or aristocracy, sacrifices everything ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... books of Greece as a perpetual memorial; and copies there have been, since the time that they were written; but you need not go to Athens to procure them, nor would you find them in Athens. Strange to say, strange to the nineteenth century, that in the age of Plato and Thucydides, there was not, it is said, a bookshop in the whole place: nor was the book trade in existence till the very time of Augustus. Libraries, I suspect, were the bright invention of Attalus or the Ptolemies; I doubt whether Athens had ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... wherby men be the werkers of rightfull thynges (that is to saye) whereby they bothe loue & also do suche thynges as be iust. This done: I serche the causes of Iustice (that is to say) from whens it toke the fyrst begynnyng / and by cause that it is a morall vertue: and Plato in the ende of his Dialogue Meno[n] concludeth that all vertue cometh of god: I am assured that god is the chief cause of Iustice: declaryng it to the worlde by his Instrument ma[n]nes wyt / whiche the same Plato affyrmeth in the ...
— The Art or Crafte of Rhetoryke • Leonard Cox

... results and conditions the whole being sympathizes. The perception of a certain range of truth, such as is indicated by Plato, Hegel, Swedenborg, and which is very far from what is called "religious" or "moral," I should regard as the best testimonial that could be offered of a man's probity and essential nobility of soul. Is it possible to imagine a fickle, inconstant, or a ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs

... time of education and training under proper supervision lasts, the more successful finally at the end of life the man will be. When one considers that Aristotle, who is perhaps generally accepted as the world's greatest thinker, associated with his great teacher, Plato, twenty years, until he was thirty-eight years of age and produced nearly all his important works only after that time, we may see one example of the profound importance of training. The care of parents for their children throughout all of their early years would naturally imply loyalty ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks

... owned as things were, and could be given, lent, sold, and bequeathed. They could not possess property, nor have wives in assured exclusive possession against masters. Their children belonged to their masters. Plato thought that nature had made some to command, others to serve.[742] He thought the soul of a slave base, incapable of good, unworthy of confidence.[743] Aristotle thought that every well-appointed house needs animate and inanimate tools. The animate ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... the plate of porridge, which was his own usual breakfast—threw the slops of what he called his "crowning dish of tea" into the sugar-dish instead of the slop-basin, and concluded with spilling the scalding liquor upon old Plato, the Colonel's favourite spaniel, who received the libation with a howl that did little ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott

... judges of beauty. Socrates calls beauty (we dare not use the contemptible it,) a short-lived tyranny: Xenophon says "Fire burns only when we are near it; but a beautiful face burns and inflames, though at a distance: Plato calls beauty a privilege of nature: Theophrastus (arch fellow,) a silent cheat: Theocritus, (cunning elf,) a delightful prejudice; Carneades, a solitary kingdom, (which he doubtless would keep to himself): Domitian says that nothing is ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 580, Supplemental Number • Various

... can be borne, by reverence towards God, and lastly by mercy towards men. The soul thus discovers its true haven; it lays down the sword; its voice calls no longer to strife, but to peace; it now inspires and uplifts, and Greek literature ends with Socrates and Plato, Rome with Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, England with Carlyle and Ruskin, America with Emerson, and Germany with Goethe. Letters indeed go on in England, in America, and in Germany, but the cycle is completed; and higher than Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Goethe, Emerson, Carlyle, and Ruskin, the soul need ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin

... These studies were followed only for the purpose of perfecting and beautifying the personality. Conversation in the modern salon is so excessively dull that it is necessary to fill in the emptiness with singing and piano playing. Still the symposiums of Plato were not always the order of the day in the drawing-rooms of the Renaissance, and it must be admitted that their social disputations would cause us intolerable weariness; however, tastes were different at that time. In a circle ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius

... to write an essay once a week, and I remember that Holland made a name for his essay-writing and originality. It was known that he had a good chance of a 'First in Greats,' if only his translations from Greek and Latin books did not pull him down. He admired the ancient authors, especially Plato, and his quick grasp of the meaning of what he read, good memory, and very remarkable powers of expression, all helped him much. He was good at History and he had a great turn for Philosophy" (cf. Mr. Squeers, supra), "Plato, ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell

... silent about that which he knows well, and will fancy himself called upon to speak of the tropics or the Andes—-on the reports of others. Never having seen a greater man than the parson and the squire and not having seen into them—he selects Cromwell and Plato, Raphael and Napoleon, as his models, in the vain belief that these impressive personalities will make his work impressive. Of course I am speaking figuratively. By "never having been beyond his village," I understand ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes

... Plato, amicus Socrates, magis tamen amica veritas." From his custom of delivering instruction whilst walking, his disciples ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 355, October 16, 1886 • Various

... as a necklace. One would take to slumming and another to sniffing brandy through the nose; one had a table-cover made of woven roses, and another was wearing perfumed flannel at sixteen dollars a yard; one had inaugurated ice-skating in August, and another had started a class for the study of Plato. Some were giving tennis tournaments in bathing-suits, and playing leap-frog after dinner; others had got dispensations from the Pope, so that they might have private chapels and confessors; and yet others were giving "progressive dinners," moving from one restaurant to another—a cocktail ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair

... something more than a vehicle for the mere sense of the beautiful, an exquisite provocation wherewith to startle the sense of a selfish, epicurean pleasure; that its highest function—to follow the idea of the Greek Plato, and the greatest of his modern disciples, Schopenhauer—is to serve as the incarnation of the true and the good; and, even as Goethe makes the Earth-Spirit ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris

... cite, among those who have wrought strongly upon opinion or practice in science, Aristotle, Plato, Ptolemy, Euclid, Archimedes, Roger Bacon, Copernicus, Francis Bacon, Ramus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Napier, Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton, Locke. I take none but names known out of their {6} fields of work; and all were learned ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan

... of Samos, who flourished at the end of the 5th century B.C. After the fall of Athens he settled at the court of Archelaus, king of Macedonia, where he was the associate of Agathon, Melanippides, and Plato the comic poet. The only work that can with certainty be attributed to him is the [Greek: Perseis] or [Greek: Persika], a history of the struggle of the Greeks against Persia, the central point of which was the battle of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various

... essay, criticism, and poetry. Count Tolstoy, however, has shown us that a novel may be an essay rather than a story. No less a writer than Swift used the medium of fiction for his most brilliant criticism of life; his fables, apart from their satire, are often mere essays. Plato, Sir Thomas More, William Morris, and Mr. H. G. Wells have not disdained to transmit their philosophy under the domino of romance or myth. Some of the greatest poets—Ruskin and Pater for example—have chosen prose for their instrument of expression. If that theory is true ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross

... if it is wisely chosen, and if he knows it all, can sometimes confound a whole assembly of scholars. An American poet once declared to me that all leisure time is lost that is not spent in reading Shakespeare. And we remember Emerson's panegyric upon Plato's writings, borrowing from the Caliph Omar his famous (but apocryphal) sentence against all books but the Koran: "Burn all the libraries, for their value is in this book." So Sheffield, duke ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford

... Faustus. Jove, It was a faery buck, indeed, that Will Poached in that greenwood." "Ben, see that you walk Like Adam, naked! Nay, in nakedness Adam was first. Trust me, you'll not escape This calumny! Vergil is damned—he wears A hen-coop round his waist, nicked in the night From Homer! Plato is branded for a thief, Why, he wrote Greek! And old Prometheus, too, Who stole his fire from heaven!" "Who printed it?" "Chettle! I know not why, unless he too Be one of those same dwarfs that find the world Too narrow for their ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... down the stairway, closing the trap-door upon himself, and the curtain is drawn upon darkness and wind. It opens a moment later on the greenhouse in the sunshine of a snowy morning. The snow piled outside is at times blown through the air. The frost has made patterns on the glass as if—as Plato would have it—the patterns inherent in abstract nature and behind all life had to come out, not only in the creative heat within, but in the creative cold on the other side of the glass. And the wind makes patterns of sound ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell

... and my loving thoughts. I studied the wisdom of the ancients, and gazed on the happy walls that sheltered the beloved of my soul. My mind was nevertheless idle. I pored over the poetry of old times; I studied the metaphysics of Plato and Berkeley. I read the histories of Greece and Rome, and of England's former periods, and I watched the movements of the lady of my heart. At night I could see her shadow on the walls of her apartment; by day I viewed her in her flower-garden, or riding in the park ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley

... appeared beyond a fine extent of verdure. He had a good house provided for him, and numbers of people came to visit him; among them was Faki Sambo, who was totally blind. He had travelled much and was well versed in Arabic literature, having read even portions of Aristotle and Plato, translated into Arabic. The doctor had many interesting conversations with ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston

... wine), conversed with his friends (to whom his house was ever open), again walked out, and usually finished with reading to his wife till ten o'clock, when he went to bed. This was his daily existence. His book was generally Plato, or Homer, or one of the Greek tragedians, or the Bible, in which last he took a great interest. Out of twenty-four hours he frequently read sixteen. "He wrote his Prometheus," says Willis, "in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various

... the history of her own country, and that of Assyria, Greece and Rome; and all the written languages of the world were to her familiar. She had been educated by the philosophers, who had brought from Greece the science of Pythagoras and Plato. Her companions had been men—not women, or nurses, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard

... to study. For father and mother were severe and found much in her to blame: on the other hand quiet hours of inward satisfaction were given her by the instructions of a teacher, always alike kindly disposed, who initiated her into learning and an acquaintance with literature: bending over her Plato, she did not miss the amusement of the chase which others were enjoying in the Park. After her marriage too, which did not make her exactly happy, she still lived thus with her thoughts withdrawn from the world, when she was one day summoned ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke

... it, as impertinent or curious; and so would have their ignorance seem judgment. Some are never without a difference, and commonly by amusing men with a subtilty, blanch the matter; of whom A. Gellius saith, Hominem delirum, qui verborum minutiis rerum frangit pondera. Of which kind also, Plato, in his Protagoras, bringeth in Prodius in scorn, and maketh him make a speech, that consisteth of distinction from the beginning to the end. Generally, such men in all deliberations find ease to be of the negative side, and affect a credit to object and foretell difficulties; ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon

... my mouth. It is clear that I have a complex about the higher life, and it may be a sour-grapes complex. All the same I should like to attend a summer course at Amersfoort and listen to the wise men dilate on the Bhagavadgita, Psycho-analysis and Religion, Plato, Sufism, and other subjects on the programme; anyway I would have no prepossessions and prejudices in listening to Dr. G. R. S. Meads' course of lectures on The Mystical Philosophy and Gnosis ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill

... (5th century A.D.), Greek philosopher, the son of Hermias or Hermeias, a fellow-pupil of Proclus. He taught at Alexandria, and had among his scholars Asclepius, John Philoponus, Damascius and Simplicius. His commentaries on Plato and Ptolemy are lost. Those on Aristotle are all that remain of his reputedly numerous writings. Of the commentaries we have—(1) one on the Isagoge of Porphyry (Venice, 1500 fol.); (2) one on the Categories (Venice, 1503 fol.), ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... dat w'ite man marster fur?" whispered a tall yellow boy to the acrobat addressed as Plato. "You don' b'long ter him no mo'; you're free, an' ain' got sense ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt

... should ask as Lord of Misrule, and Dr. Johnson as the Abbot of Unreason. I would suggest to Major Dobbin to accompany Mrs. Fry; Alcibiades would bring Homer and Plato in his purple-sailed galley; and I would have Aspasia, Ninon de l'Enclos, and Mrs. Battle, to make up a table of whist with Queen Elizabeth. I shall order a seat placed in the oratory for Lady Jane Grey and Joan ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis

... PLATO. Review of the Dialogues containing portions of Ethical Theory:—Alkibiades I. discusses Just and Unjust. Alkibiades II. the knowledge of Good or Reason. Hippias Minor identifies Virtue with Knowledge. Minos (on Law) refers everything to the decision of an Ideal Wise man. Laekes resolves ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain

... just been introduced? The opening of the door, therefore, caused them quickly to change their position; not so hastily, however, but that the young officer who then entered the room had a glimpse of their situation.——"Aha! said he, have I caught you? Is my philosophic Plato so soon metamorphosed to a bon ton enamarato? But a few hours ago, sir, and you were proof against the whole arcana of beauty, and all the artillery of the graces; but no sooner are you for one moment tete a tete with a fashionable ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.

... the acknowledged influence of beauty. "When one sees a god-like countenance," said Socrates to Phaedrus, "or some bodily form that represents beauty, he reverences it as a god, and would sacrifice to it." From the days of Plato till now, all have felt the power of woman's beauty, and been more than willing to sacrifice to it. The proper, not exclusive search for it is a legitimate inspiration. The way for a girl to obtain her portion of this radiant ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke

... race." Here the formative process is a birth, not a creation; it is evolution pure and simple. "According to the ancient view," says Professor Lewis, "the present world was a growth; it was born, it came from something antecedent, not merely as a cause but as its seed, embryo or principium. Plato's world was a 'zoon,' a living ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler

... pernicious. Fiction, on the other hand, a good thing. Antiquity of fiction. In early days couched in verse. Civilisation prefers prose. Fiction, from the earlier ages, intended to convey Moral Instruction. Opinion of Aristotle defended against that of Plato. Morality in mediaeval Romance. Criticism of Mr. Frederic Harrison. Opinion of Moliere. Yet French novels usually immoral, and why. Remarks on Popery. To be avoided. Morality of Richardson and of Sir Walter Scott. Impropriety ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang

... Mr. Smooth-it-away. "You observe this convenient bridge. We obtained a sufficient foundation for it by throwing into the slough some editions of books of morality, volumes of French philosophy and German rationalism; tracts, sermons, and essays of modern clergymen; extracts from Plato, Confucius, and various Hindoo sages together with a few ingenious commentaries upon texts of Scripture,—all of which by some scientific process, have been converted into a mass like granite. The whole bog might be filled ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... communicating their refined ideas to each other; but it is likewise necessary to the inferior happiness of every subordinate degree of society, down to the very lowest. For instance; we will suppose a conversation between Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and three dancing-masters. It will be acknowledged, I believe, that the heel sophists would be as little pleased with the company of the philosophers as ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding

... bushes agroaning. From time to time a little sputter of rain pattered up against the window-pane. I sat until near midnight, glancing over the fragment on immortality by Iamblichus, the Alexandrian platonist, of whom the Emperor Julian said that he was posterior to Plato in time but not in genius. At last, shutting up my book, I opened my door and took a last look at the dreary fell and still more dreary sky. As I protruded my head, a swoop of wind caught me and sent the red ashes of my pipe sparkling and dancing through the darkness. ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle

... attempt to trace some of the various ways in which this feeling after the infinite manifests itself. Plato and his school tried to explain the existence of absolute ideas in the soul by the hypothesis of its preexistence to that of the body in the bosom of the Absolute, the Infinite, the Eternal; and, consequently, that such ideas are but reminiscences ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... nor Philosophy, nor all together can thus come to the service of man, can not do it now, after all the weary centuries since Plato and Aristotle, we may as well write qui bono on our banners and trail them ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck

... commonly disagreeing from the common judgment of the world; such also have they published by pen and tongue; and yet notwithstanding they themselves have lived in the common society with others, and have borne patiently with the errors and imperfections which they could not amend." Thus did "Plato the philosopher:" thus will do John Knox. "I have communicated my judgment to the world: if the realm finds no inconvenience from the regiment of a woman, that which they approve, shall I not further disallow than within my own breast; but shall be as well content to live under your Grace, ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Plato has said that "the end of education should be the training by suitable habits of the instincts of virtue in ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock

... interest and profit by commerce were in their nature immoral, are in close accord with the old Greek and Jewish ideas regarding property profits and interest. Aristotle held, for instance, that only the gains of agriculture, of fishing, and of hunting are natural gains. Plato, in the Laws, forbids the taking of interest. Cato says that lending money on interest is dishonorable, is as bad as murder. The Old Testament, likewise, forbids the taking of interest from a Jew. The reason for this universal feeling of antiquity, both Oriental and Occidental, lies in ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick

... influence impresses me with awe," replied the contemplative maiden: "In such an hour as this, Plato must have received the sublime thought, 'God is ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child

... with his Homer. Stephanus, with his Greek Testament. Froben, with his Plato. Koberger, with his Nuremberg Chronicle. Caxton, with ...
— Printing and the Renaissance - A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New York • John Rothwell Slater

... of all artistic inquiry lies here. What is beauty? And to this question God forbid that we Christians should give a narrower answer than Plato gave in the old times before Christ arose, for he directs the aspirant who would discover the beautiful to "consider of greater value the beauty existing in the soul, than that existing in the body." More gracefully he teaches the same doctrine when he tells us that "there ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... religion which in some points resembles ours, and Zarathustra, according to the scholars, flourished at least eight hundred years before Christ. I say 'at least,' since Gaffarel, after examining the testimony of Plato, Xanthus of Lydia, Pliny, Hermippus, and Eudoxus, believes it to have been two thousand five hundred years before our era. However that may be, it is certain that Zarathustra talked of a kind of purgatory and showed ways of getting free from it. The living ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... entering into the Greek fancy because it belongs to all ages, has expressed it in its most exquisite form, in a design of Ceres and her children, of whom their mother is no longer afraid, as in the Homeric hymn to Pan. The puck- noses have grown delicate, so that, with Plato's infatuated lover, you may call them winsome, if you please; and no one would wish those hairy little shanks away, with which one of the small Pans walks at her side, grasping her skirt stoutly; while the other, the sick or weary one, rides in the arms of Ceres herself, who in graceful Italian ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... it is caused by joy, anger, laughter and especially by fear, for then the heat forsakes the womb, and goes to the heart, and so the cold sinks into the womb, whereby the ligaments are relaxed, and so abortion follows. On this account, Plato recommended that the woman should avoid all temptations to excessive joy and pleasure, as well as all occasions for fear and grief. Abortion may also be caused by the pollution of the air by filthy odours, and especially by the smell of the smouldering wick of a candle, ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous

... of the World is the 'Mecanique Celeste' divested of that great apparatus of analytical formulae which must be attentively perused by every astronomer who, to use an expression of Plato, wishes to know the numbers which govern the physical universe. It is from this work that persons ignorant of mathematics may obtain competent knowledge of the methods to which physical astronomy owes its astonishing progress. Written with a noble simplicity ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... and beauty of developed manhood. The saint of the mediaeval mosaic represents the body in its extreme maceration and humiliation. The rhetorician, Dio Chrysostom, in a somewhat whimsical passage, which was suggested by a remark of Plato, found a special moral significance in the fact that Homer, though he places his heroes on the the banks of what he calls 'the fishy Hellespont,' never makes them eat fish, but always flesh and the flesh of oxen, for this, as he says, ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky

... like English; with words like pictures, with words like the gossamer films of the summer; at once the variety and picturesqueness of Homer; the gloom and the intensity of AEschylus; not compressed to the closest by Thucydides, nor fathomed to the bottom by Plato; not sounding with all its thunders, nor lit up with all its ardours even under the Promethean touch ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge

... its own tendencies and the sight of its own triumphs; and that those who set their minds to the building gain an added grace in the labour. It is a perfectly fair and consistent assumption, but Mr Wells has been warned by his predecessors, from Robert Owen back to Plato and forward to Edward Bellamy, that the designs for Utopia have always been flawed by an altered conception of the humanity that walks within the city; and he has begun by trying to avoid a fallacy and ended by begging a question that he might very ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford

... oracles which were written before the dawn of science! What are Gall and Spurzheim, Darwin and Wallace, Crookes and De Morgan, to professors who can fluently read Aristotle in Greek, and can tell how Plato proved that a table is not a table but ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various

... we are now concerned is a very old one, since it was brought into philosophy by Plato. Plato's 'theory of ideas' is an attempt to solve this very problem, and in my opinion it is one of the most successful attempts hitherto made. The theory to be advocated in what follows is largely Plato's, with merely such modifications as ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell

... full justice to the courage and patriotism of all grades in the Russian army, but it is constantly evident that his sympathies are most heartily with the rank and file. What genuine feeling and affection rings in this sketch of Plato, a common soldier, in ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy

... within from those outside the moral sphere was never more sharply conceived, than in the difference commonly held to exist between Greeks and Barbarians. Yet even so Greece can maintain her pre-eminence in thought; for Plato and Euripides at least glimpsed the conception, by which we do not yet consent to be guided, of the moral equality ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato

... head of the weighty class of writers in our language; but going beyond these to the "Areopagitica" of Milton, or even to the powerful prose of Raleigh, you pass the boundary-line, and are touched with the buoyant influences of the Muse. Shakspeare and Plato are lighter than levity; they are lifting forces, and weigh less than nothing. The novelette of the season, or any finest and flimsiest gossamer that is fabricated in our literary looms, compares with "Lear," with "Prometheus Bound," with any supreme work, only as cobwebs and thistle-down, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various

... drawn to these two centres. According to the fundamental canon, a conic section should be a beautiful curve; and the proof that it is so is to be found in the attention which these curves have always drawn upon themselves from artists and from mathematicians. Plato, equally great in mathematics and in metaphysics, is said to have been the first to investigate the properties of the ellipse. For about a century and a half, to the time of Apollonius, the beauty of this curve, and of its variations, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various

... blare the two hundred thousand curved trumpets which Solomon had made for his temple, and the forty thousand which accompanied the Psalms of David. Jubal played his Magrepha; Pythagoras came with his Monochord; Plato listened to the music of the spheres; the priests of Joshua blew seven times upon their Shofars or Rams-Horns. And ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker

... Renaissance commentaries were virtually united in regarding satire as exalted moral instruction and satirists as ethical philosophers. Casaubon's choice for this sort of praise was Persius; Heinsius and Stapylton likened their respective choices, Horace and Juvenal, to Socrates and Plato; and Rigault considered all three satirists to be philosophers, distinguished only by the different styles which their different periods required. The satirist might disguise himself as a jester, but only to make his moral wisdom more ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte

... even recognised the possibility of reaching India by sailing westward. Certain traditions of the Greeks and the Irish had placed mysterious islands far out to the west in the Atlantic, and the great philosopher Plato had imagined a country named Atlantis, far out in the Indian Ocean, where men were provided with all the gifts of nature. These views of the ancients came once more to the attention of the learned, owing to the ...
— The Story of Geographical Discovery - How the World Became Known • Joseph Jacobs

... of some of the New England clergy. The face of the Revolutionary preacher, Samuel Cooper, as Copley painted it, looks upon me with the pleasantest of smiles and a liveliness of expression which makes him seem a contemporary after a hundred years' experience of eternity. The Plato on this lower shelf bears the inscription: "Ezroe Stiles, 1766. Olim e libris Rev. Jaredis Eliot de Killingworth." Both were noted scholars and philosophers. The hand-lens before me was imported, with other philosophical instruments, by the Reverend John Prince of Salem, an earlier student ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... important was "Atlantis." Some have thought it may possibly have been a prehistoric discovery of America. In any case it has exercised the ingenuity of a good many modern scientists. The tale of Atlantis we owe to Plato himself, who perhaps learned it in Egypt, just as Herodotus picked up there the account of the circumnavigation of Africa by the ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson

... suovetaurilia, the sacrifice of the hog, the ram, and the bull. Tiridates did the same by the sacrifice of a horse. Tacitus does not mention the river god, but the river itself, as propitiated (see [Annals,] book vi, chap. 37).[3] Plato makes Socrates condemn Homer for making Achilles behave disrespectfully towards the river Xanthus, though acknowledged to be a divinity, in offering to fight him,[4] and towards the river Sperchius, another acknowledged god, in presenting ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... in the Symposium and Phaedon of Plato. The second sentence in this chapter is very corrupt in the original, and the translation is merely a guess at the meaning. Favonius was aedile in B.C. 53 (Dion Cassius, 40. ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch

... time?—I suppose about 5823 years old,—that is, counting from Archbishop Usher's date of the Creation, and adding the life of the race, whose accumulated intelligence is a part of my inheritance, to my own. A good deal older than Plato, you see, and much more experienced than my Lord Bacon and most of the world's teachers.—Old books, as you well know, are books of the world's youth, and new books are fruits of its age. How many of all these ancient folios round me are like so many old cupels! The gold has passed out ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)

... psychological enigmas, and may, for aught we know, be an instinct of fact. The Rabbis taught a threefold division—nephesh, the animal, ruah, the human, and neshamah, the divine soul, which corresponds to that of Plato into thumos, epithumia, and nous. And even Saint Paul seems to have recognized such inherent plurality when he distinguishes between the bodily soul, the intellectual soul, and the spiritual gift, in his Epistle to ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton

... Theatre.—A school of vice. Injurious to health. Diseases produced by it. Its danger to morals. Opinions and facts from Griscom, Rousseau, Hawkins, Tillotson, Collier, Hale, Burgh, and Plato. Anecdote. Antiquity of theatres. No safety but in ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott

... form and manly strength were the pride of the wisest and most learned men of the nation, denoting that physical excellence was considered the necessary concomitant of moral or intellectual worth. Authentic annals tell us that Plato and Pythagoras appeared as wrestlers at the public games; and who shall say that these philosophical gymnasts did not derive much of their mental vigor from this exciting exercise? In this age it is easy to see that sculpture must have received ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various



Words linked to "Plato" :   capital of Greece, philosopher, Athinai, Greek capital, Athens



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